If a programmer named Phil Zimmermann had his druthers, he would be leading a pretty sedate life on the whole. He drives a Saturn, lives in a small house in a middle-class suburb in Colorado with his wife and children, and dons a suit and does a pretty good yuppie act when he consults for East Coast companies. In California he fits in with his blue jeans. Short and paunchy, he is bearded yet harmless.

Some American bureaucrats, however, would lump Zimmermann in with CIA turncoats and peddlers of illegal plutonium. In November 1994 customs agents detained him at a Washington-area airport when he was reentering the States from Eastern Europe. Twice they combed through his bags then warned him that in the future he might be in for more of the same.

Why this Kafkaesque treatment? Because many in the U.S. national security establishment hate Phil Zimmermann’s guts. He came up with Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP for short—a snoop-resistant way of transmitting e-mail over the Internet and other networks.

Zimmermann loathes snoops and jackboots. Clearly he was not in the former communist Europe to subvert democracies; in fact, he was telling people how encryption^[6.1] could help preserve their freedom. “I don’t have to explain to Eastern Europe,” he said, “why it is important for their governments not to get too powerful.”^[6.2]

This dictator-proofing helped win Phil Zimmermann a “Pioneer Award” from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the civil liberties group, which praised him for creating “a worldwide standard for e-mail encryption.”

Zimmermann, however, as the Net’s many libertarians are quick to note, may end up in jail for allegedly having violated an American export law that carries penalties as high as a decade in prison and a million-dollar fine. The Feds treat PGP-style software as a weapon just like Stealth bombers, ballistic missiles, and nuclear warheads. And some Washington bureaucrats hate the idea of such a privacy protector in the hands of too many civilians who are not, well, Washington bureaucrats.

Even if the Feds don’t indict and convict Zimmermann, the U.S. government has already done its share of bullying here.

The U.S. Constitution forbids prosecutors from dragging Zimmermann into an overlit room and interrogating him without a lawyer present. Tell that to Washington, however. Although the law bans the export rather than the import of powerful encryption software, customs agents at Dulles Airport, eager for any excuse they could find, quizzed Zimmermann when he returned from Eastern Europe. An oft-zealous enemy of privacy, the Clinton Administration has even promoted the manufacture of encryption devices that would let Feds listen in on supposedly confidential phone calls. Washington is also spending billions of tax dollars to make telephone lines more susceptible to tapping.

Zimmermann, meanwhile, has been working on a phone-style piece of software. Used on the right computer with a $50 sound card and a $7 microphone, it would let people speak securely over the Internet or ordinary phone lines.

Bill Clinton’s snoops must love Zimmermann about as much as they enjoy static during wiretaps. Here’s a man who they fear could break the connection altogether. Many in Washington, especially FBI Director Louis Freeh, would love to see unauthorized encryption banned entirely, the real issue here. And Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa has proposed to make it a crime to distribute scrambling programs by way of international nets if the Feds lacked the electronic keys to defeat them. The Grassley measure would even ban some software now classified as exportable.

Like it or not, however, Washington no longer can control the fate of industrial-strength encryption.

Far too many Americans—and Russians, Germans, Czechs, Iranians, Singaporeans, Malaysians, Japanese, Chinese, you name it—know about the technology. The Feds instead should focus on different law enforcement techniques, and on powerful computers to unravel the bad guys’ codes. But the Clinton people and their allies won’t budge. They keep dreaming of the mass use of D.C.-blessed hardware and software to let law enforcement people listen in on supposedly confidential phone calls. Just like the old Soviet KGB, the Feds think that bureaucracy can prevail over technology, and that government has a God-given right to force citizens to be snoop-friendly.

The saga of Phil Zimmermann is hardly the only indication that some Big Brotherism is alive and well in the United States—especially when one considers other outrages, such as the recent net.censorship jihad or the elitist copyright proposals that would crimp public debate.

In all fairness, the United States is less backwards on encryption matters than are countries such as France, which bans powerful cryptography for private use.^[6.3] And certainly Bill Clinton isn’t a dictator. In fact, the trouble with him, at least at the personal level, is the opposite: He is too much of a wimp to resist civil liberties threats from the FBI, the National Security Agency, other bureaucracies, and the more maniacal of the “law-and-order” crowd on the Hill.

Whatever Clinton’s problem, though, his encryption policy is making him reviled among many skeptical young people in Generation Net, not to mention the baby boomers, who suffered lie after lie from LBJ and Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. A lifelong Democrat, I voted for Clinton. I might not again. His constitutional lapses, or at least those of his bureaucrats, just might help pave the way for true Orwellian scenarios in the United States and elsewhere.

So might the shameful war that a powerful Clinton appointee has waged against public libraries, one of society’s best defenses against Orwellian Ministries of Truth.

“Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong,” then, is an apt sub-title for this chapter. You’ll remember the basics of the novel 1984—bureaucrats tinkered with back issues of the London Times to suit the policies of the moment, brainwashed the proles of Oceania, and spied on most everyone with TV cameras. All had to obey the mythical Big Brother. The most vivid image from 1984 was a boot smashing again and again into a man’s face. In the era of mainframe computers bigger than overgrown Cadillacs, many critics of the Vietnam War invoked Orwell and similar pessimists. Wouldn’t pasty-faced drones in windowless rooms use the technology to keep dossiers on us?

Then microcomputers popped up. Suddenly good people could use bits and bytes to fight back against Big Brother. Amnesty International, for example, could keep databases documenting murder, torture, and other crimes by dictators. And then, via the Internet and other networks, Amnesty could spread the news around and marshal world opinion against the thugs. Other human rights groups and environmental organizations benefited, too, and soon most everyone agreed about high tech: George Orwell had been wrong. Progressives with unpopular ideas celebrated the new tools available to them. And conservatives didn’t disagree that Big Brother was dead; if microcomputers could nurture freedom and diversity, why worry so much about antitrust laws and other regulations? A New York think-tanker would eventually write a reverse 1984 in which hackers won over Big Brother.^[6.4]

Meanwhile, an open government movement was growing on the Internet, along with efforts to use networks as an efficient conduit for services. Far from being Big Brotherish in all ways, Clinton’s people commendably put a wealth of official documents on the Net, everything from White House speeches to reports from the Agriculture Department. The states, too, acted. Californians could track down a complete set of laws and proposed laws on the Internet. North Carolinians could hook into an electronic job bank, indicate their desired kind of work, click on a map to designate a favored location, and watch jobs pop up. Oregonians could get fishing-and hunting-license information online.

Bureaucrats in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Finland, Austria, Poland, Japan, and a host of other countries went on the Net to one extent or another.

Even Singapore, hardly famous for civil liberties and freedom of information, took a few steps to open up. I was surprised and pleased to find on a government server a 1993 Wired article with the not-so-flattering title of “The Intelligent Island?” Like many countries, Singapore faced a dilemma. Would the country’s strict culture suffer if the masses were allowed access to the Net? Singapore had flogged an American teenager merely for vandalizing automobiles; imagine if authorities instead had caught him in a sex act with a local. The whip was in character; it was a source of local pride, not shame. And yet if Singapore didn’t truly open itself on the Internet, if it couldn’t provide a hospitable electronic environment to megaconglomerates, the country would fall behind nations with a freer flow of information.

“Most Singaporeans are little rule followers,” a local hacker told Wired. “They are used to being spoon-fed what they are supposed to know by the government.” He predicted that Singapore would turn into a “controlled information center. The government will try to suppress hackers.”^[6.5] And yet the very distribution of the article—for all to see on a Web server, amid official government documents—told me that the Orwellian scenario was not a full certainty. If Singapore could ease up a little, there might yet be a little hope for the rest of the cosmos.

However, the need for some healthy paranoia remains, even if, yes, Orwell overstated his case. An Internet Central doesn’t exist for bureaucrats to shut down, of course; messages can arrive by way of many paths, and electronic mail if need be can travel over normal voice lines. But martinets of all ilks can’t resist the urge to censor or unplug. A government computer in Canada is rumored to be programmed to reject Anglo-Saxonisms as passwords, and I don’t doubt it. Would that all outrages were so funny.

Claiming software piracy, cops shut down the electronic bulletin boards of scores of Italian progressives. “In some places,” the activist Bernardo Parrella reported, “sleeping people were abruptly woken up facing machine guns.” The boards were part of FidoNet, a worldwide BBS system with electronic mail connections to the Internet. Significantly the police didn’t undertake similar harassment against the high-tech admirers of Hitler and Mussolini. The victims were liberal or left wing. Within a year, the Italian cops were back at it again, seizing computers, disks, books, diaries, and other materials from citizens suspected of anarchistic sympathies. This time the police made no pretense; the raids were clearly political.

Politicians and bureaucrats can be just as prickly about sex as about politics. In Singapore, prudes searched the hard disk of computer systems to see if the good citizens were enjoying the alt.sex newsgroups. And back in the States, Senator J. James Exon of Nebraska concocted a nutty scheme to ban “indecent” material from the public areas of the Net. 1984 once more came to mind. Big Brother loathed sex, as Winston Smith, Orwell’s hero, knew all too well in carrying on an illicit affair with a female bureaucrat.

Jim Exon also hated sex—at least on the Net. I could appreciate his worries; did nine-year-olds really need to gawk at alt.sex.bestiality, or kiddie porn, or the next Brandy’s Babes? Exon, though, again and again, scrambled his facts. He relied partly on a breathless article that the Washington Post had run under the headline “Molesting Children by Computer.” Among other things, writer Sandy Rovner had advised parents to check their kids’ computers for files ending in “.BMP”. None other than the Microsoft Windows software, however, left .BMP files on hard drives—as a way to display images such as the corporate logo. Might Microsoft be a new Sodom?

“Obviously I had not researched the story enough,” Rovner admitted to her great credit. “I am new to the world of cyberspace.... I have a computer coach, but even he is behind on the Internet. Yes, I violated a cardinal rule of journalism—I didn’t know enough about what I was writing about. And I certainly wasn’t thinking censorship. Mea culpa. I am a staunch supporter of the First Amendment, as all journalists are or should be.” And yet Exon cited “Molesting” on the Senate floor to justify his repressive, cyberspace-oriented change in the existing Communications Decency Act. “Argghh,” went Rovner.

Even more significantly, Exon, as noted earlier, failed to grasp the difference between the Internet and television. Children wouldn’t just flick on a computer and see a Madonna look-alike climaxing with a German shepherd. They would have to look for pornography. And the industry was ready to work on software, such as SurfWatch, to help parents keep their kids out of pre-designated areas of the Net.

Nothing would be foolproof or teen-proof, of course. Brilliant technologists had designed the Internet to survive 100-megaton H-bombs. “The Net,” said the hacker John Gilmore in an oft-repeated quote, “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Parents’ best response would be at home. Mothers and fathers shouldn’t expect Uncle Sam to play nanny. As Steve Case, president of America Online, noted in connection with his company, parents should never turn their children loose in a city of millions of people. And I believed that the same held true of the Internet. Why should parents count on everything being constantly under control. Put the Net on a leash short enough to suit Exon, and the pornography would still persist—encrypted and on non-Net bulletin boards if nothing else—but legitimate users would suffer. Some Internet providers might even shut down to avoid legal liabilities. Moreover, in an era of global commerce, Washington shouldn’t put America at such a disadvantage. The losses in trade and jobs eventually would reach the billions, given the estimated hundreds of billions of Net-generated business.

“The only thing that censorship will do is drive the best and brightest members of the U.S. Internet community to countries where they can express themselves without risk of reprisal—and drain the United States of its valuable intellectual capital,” Interactive Publishing Alert’s Rosalind Resnick would later write.^[6.6] “Personally I’d rather see a few four-letter words flicker across my computer screen every now and then than risk losing talented writers, artists and programmers to our economic competitors.” A mother of two, she counseled parents: “Keep the computer in a public area of the house, such as the den or living room, not in your kid’s bedroom. Warn your kids about the dangers of pedophiles and urge them never to give out their phone number or address to anyone they meet online.” That was a far better approach than Washington-mandated net.censorship, one that could work with the smartest hacker-child. Even the hyper Post article had played up similar solutions. But Jim Exon couldn’t keep his hands off the Net.

In a superb illustration of the dark side of electronic democracy, Exon held up a blue binder full of net.smut and, on the C-SPAN television network, argued for censorship of cyberspace. The vote in the Senate was 84 to 16—how could U.S. senators oppose “decency?” Given all the sex scandals on the Hill, it was scene worthy of Elmer Gantry, the Sinclair Lewis novel about a moralizing preacher who nonetheless indulges in sex and booze. The book, of course, ends with the Rev. Gantry promising, “We shall yet make these United States a moral nation.”

Around the same time the Senate was hoping to Disneyize the Internet, Bob Dole, the Republican majority leader, was protecting Bob Packwood by opposing a move to open the Ethics Committee hearings into the personal behavior of the oversexed senator from Oregon. As reported by the Washington Post, Packwood allegedly had grabbed and kissed scads of women—from campaign workers to female staff members, lobbyists, a hotel clerk, and a baby-sitter—“sometimes forcing his tongue into their mouth or fondling them.” Packwood, while not owing up to every particular, had apologized for being “terribly offensive to women.” And now he and Bob Dole had voted for Draconian net.morality? Dole had even teamed up with several other senators, including Charles Grassley, the champion of snoop-friendly software, to offer a cyber-censor bill worse even than Exon’s.

The ironies wouldn’t stop. None other than Donna Rice, whose escapades with ex-Senator Gary Hart had helped kill off his political career, was now praying and crusading against cyber smut—as a spokeswoman for an antiporn group.

Another irony hit me. Tobacco and liquor advertisements, which promote products far deadlier to children than any obscenities, were reaching the Net. The Internet Sleuth, for example, one of my favorite collections of Net indexes, had advertised Smokin’ Joe’s tobacco products over a period of at least several weeks. And yet the Exonians could not stop fixating on words and pictures, as opposed to a massive, proven threat that had killed millions of Americans. I didn’t want the government to ban even cancer-weed ads from cyberspace, lest the regulators go wild and try to make the Net TV-bland; but if Exon and allies had to crusade, they might as well be consistent about it. Perhaps as a true children’s advocate, Exon could even give back the more than $27,000 that his campaign had collected between January 1989 and December 1994 from the tobacco and liquor industries. That was just a fraction of his total take, but a statement just the same. Maybe the operators of “adult” bulletin board systems—who used the Net to post samples, the real source of the problem—could befriend Exon-style pols with a well-funded political-action committee. “PornoPAC”?

I wondered what would happen next if the net.censors won in the House of Representatives. Earlier, in chapter 4, I had quoted Peter Lewis of the New York Times as alluding to the “pencil-dicked geeks” who flamed him. Would Washington let NetWorld! go out over an Exonized Internet? This was the only time I had ever seen such language in e-mail from Lewis, a gifted professional. Society didn’t prevent a woodcarver from using a certain kind of wood just because hoodlums might buy some baseball clubs made from it and split each other’s skulls open. Why, then, draft legislation that so despicably intruded on writers’ work? And what about teachers and students of literature, including bright, stable teenagers under eighteen? Or readers who just loved good, expressive writing? Knowingly or not, the savages in the Senate could be banning even Ulysses from the public area of the Internet. Never mind the forthcoming age of electronic books; might Washington someday go on to suppress the paper editions from stores and libraries?

Quite correctly the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned of the folly of turning the public regions of the Internet into “the equivalent of the Children’s Room at the public library,” and forcing Netfolks to seek out “adult” areas. Get carried away on an Exonized Net, use the wrong word, and the Feds could fine you up to $100,000 and jail you for up to two years. Even in private e-mail you’d need to behave yourself: You could not harass anyone with an “obscene” remark or image, lest he or she report you. What if an ex-lover took innocent comments and put them in the wrong context? Tough luck. Sooner or later the courts would probably clean up after the politicians and toss out the censorship, but that would hardly matter to the many who suffered in the meantime.

In July 1995 the censorship debate was still at full blast. Just as Jim Exon had relied on the misleading Post story, so did his side brandish a sensationalistic Time magazine cover. A shocked, wide-eyed child gaped at “CYBERPORN,” as the headline described it “EXCLUSIVE: A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” Out of character, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, one of the most Net-aware of all the reporters in the mass media, had relied on a flawed paper out of Carnegie Mellon University. The student perpetrator of the study, one Martin Rimm, had overgeneralized, and two professors at Vanderbilt disemboweled him with a 9,000-word rebuttal on the World Wide Web. If nothing else, the Rimm study had blurred the distinction between bulletin board systems and the Internet itself and also confused Usenet with the Net as a whole.

Carnegie Mellon investigated whether Rimm had violated people’s privacy. Most deliciously of all, however, from a Net perspective, he had written something else—a self-published novel with such picturesque terms as “rectum rocket.” Would that Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken had been around to chronicle the circus.

Over on the House side, Speaker Newt Gingrich sensibly let his libertarian side prevail and opposed Exon. I wasn’t surprised. How could Gingrich play nanny while railing in general against regulation and bureaucracy, especially when he himself had set up shop as a novelist? My fellow liberals, though, were amazed. It was as if they were watching the T-Rex in Jurassic Park gobble up a velociraptor that was about to enjoy a human snack.

Maybe the Exon-style proposals by now will have suffered the fate of the smaller dinosaur, but similar lunacy is bound to break out anew.^[6.7] Among some on Capitol Hill, the urge to censor is as powerful as the passion for reserved parking places.^[6.8]

If the censors do win, their narrow-mindedness may backfire in ways beyond the ones I’ve already described—and these risks will only grow in the future, as the Net becomes still more international. Puritanical countries such as Singapore might arbitrarily jail visiting Americans who, from the States, had made Internet postings deemed offensive by the standards of local dictators.^[6.9] The possibilities are endless. A U.S. novelist passing through a Mideastern country could become the next Rushdie if the local ayatollahs deemed his online work offensive.

Clinton’s Feds hardly helped when they went jurisdiction shopping and prosecuted the owners of a California BBS for sex-related material that violated community standards in Tennessee. Applied internationally, the local-standards principle could send an American to a sword-wielding executioner someday. The Bill of Rights, alas, is just a U.S. phenomenon.

However, a borderless Internet can also hinder the censorship crowd. If American bluenoses such as Exon tried to restrict an electronic Tropic of Cancer, for example, a U.S. publisher just might set up shop in countries with less infantile politicians. People in the States could then dial up the computer overseas.

Already the Net has made fools of martinets in the Canadian government. Ottawa tried to squelch newspaper accounts of a murder, claiming that the coverage would preclude a fair trial. So people in the States sent electronic care packages to their Canadian friends—articles from U.S. papers. Canadian officials banned a pulped-wood issue of Wired for attacking their stupidity; that was one of the biggest debacles of all, given the ease of dialing up electronic versions of the magazine, one of the planet’s most plugged-in publications.

Consider, too, the ramifications of anonymous servers, which strip names and other identifiers from messages, allowing Netfolks to circumvent legal bullying by governments and others. In 1995, the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles got Finnish police to raid a server in Helsinki that was posting anonymous exposés of this rather litigious organization. The server survived. But the cops forced Johan Helsingius, operator of the server, to reveal the name of a Church enemy who originated the messages. “Now users fear their secrets are at risk,” Time said of people using his computer service. Case closed on anonymous servers? Hardly.

Within weeks after the incident I read a note from a hacker telling how encrypted messages could wend their ways through chains of anonymous e-mailers in several countries, with the names of the senders remaining hidden unless most or all of the e-mailers broke under pressure. Yes, abuses are possible, such as the release of trade secrets, outright libels, forgeries, or the most vile and violent of pornography. But how much better to live out this future than one of the Orwellian variety. Tyrant-bashers in the Thirteen Colonies used the wizardry of their day, the printing press, to agitate against the Tories; now let’s hope that if Exonian politicians try to stifle the Net, enough hackers will have their most dangerous presses ready to go, the servers I’ve just described. Obsolete or not, the censors aren’t going to stop.

Other Big Brotherish urges have surfaced. While some Power People hope to be able to learn more about us by fighting PGP-style programs, they are stymieing our efforts to learn more about them. At the same time the Feds put online thousands of public documents and even the visage of Bill Clinton’s cat, some politicians on the Hill sought to weaken the Freedom of Information Act, which makes it easier to dig up dirt on public officials. Just as important, Clinton people in early 1995 were proposing new copyright laws that in effect would discourage the intelligent discussion of public issues on the Internet. It would be harder to share electronic newspaper clips. Even more disturbingly, Clinton’s copyright policy could menace our public library system in the future. Bruce Lehman, his czar of intellectual property, was coming across as Andrew Carnegie in reverse.

Carnegie is remembered as a Scot who grew rich off steel in the States and who encouraged people throughout the world to start libraries for all. He gave millions toward library buildings, with the understanding that the local taxpayers would finance their support. Carnegie wanted public libraries to be universities for the common man, and the metaphor holds up. Today, without paying for college or even for books, AmericansAmericans can educate themselves on subjects ranging from microcomputer chips to medieval history, to Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on democracy, to the case for or against feminism or abortion or public broadcasting or capital punishment. That is life in the era of paper books.

If Lehman had his wishes, however, Americans would not be able to dial up copyrighted electronic library books from home by way of the Internet Instead they would have to tote around CD-ROMs and floppy disks.

William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that, in the era of the Internet, the Lehman vision would be “the equivalent of requiring everyone who listens to music to buy 78 rpm shellac records. What will the children dial in to read? The collected speeches of Vice President Al Gore? And believe it or not, there’s also talk of the Postal Service getting involved in local public libraries through information kiosks.”^[6.10] In effect the White House approach would jack up the price of independent, privately originated information, while making it easier to obtain Washington-blessed information.

The information kiosks led some librarians to think of noses and camel’s tents. For the Postal Service at one point said it would let local librarians and citizens use the kiosks to retrieve only designated categories of information, as opposed to, say, everything on the World Wide Web. On a 1 to 10 scale of Big Brotherism, the kiosk idea as originally proposed was an 8.5 or worse.^[6.11] If the postal bureaucrats weren’t trying to be Big Brother in the strictest sense—and no, they weren’t—then they at least were unwittingly paving the way for him.

Worse, the Postal Service has talked of issuing tens of millions of “U.S. Cards” that would “mediate all government services and controls over citizens,” while at the same time an Internal Revenue Service official has proposed a system that would file our tax returns for us.^[6.12] I hate both ideas. Rather than compiling Orwellian dossiers on citizens, governments should help us computerize via TeleRead-style programs so we can more easily do the “paperwork” ourselves by way of electronic forms. Investigators could audit the forms, but only under appropriate circumstances. How much better this would be—not just e-books, but electronic empowerment against bureaucracy—than the vision that Washington and other governments have in mind for us.

Perhaps the Lehman idea and the Postal and IRS plans will have been beaten back or rendered harmless by now. Whatever happens, though, it is clear that new technology may harm both privacy and democracy if our vigilance lapses.

The threat of electronic oligarchy, stanching the free flow of facts that intelligent nonmillionaires demand, is hardly unique to the States. In the United Kingdom, for example, The Times Higher Education Supplement has warned against a copyright regime that would be a paradise for read-o-meter companies but a nightmare to people valuing free libraries. Just like Lehman’s proposal in the U.S., the wrong laws in the U.K. could lead to a Copyright Gestapo; let’s hope that neither country will criminalize one of the prerequisites for democracy: curiosity.

Given the global nature of both encryption technology and copyright law, the whole world should be watching Washington’s policies. The Clinton Administration, after all, hopes to internationalize the same mindset that could send Phil Zimmermann to jail; in fact, many of the American export controls are in effect in other countries, raising the possibility that an Australian or a British hacker could end up someday in the same predicament. In the pages that follow I’ll tell about the battles that Zimmermann and his allies have fought with Washington.

You’ll read, too, of my fight for an alternative to the Lehmanesque copyright law. My little case history suggests that the White House is not so eager to listen to ordinary mortals who speak up on the Net. Clinton’s people would rather pander to the usual campaign contributors. So far at least, pious rhetoric notwithstanding, they have basically neglected the need to put the public library system online with free or low-cost books from the private sector. Video just might end up reigning even more supreme than it does today—at the expense of abstract thought and democracy. Winston Smith would not be happy.

Father Bill Morton, an Anglican priest in Woodstock, New Brunswick, could take confessions via e-mail without violating his vows. Encryption software guarded the privacy of his communications. In Florida a bright teenager without any vices—but with a nosy mother—could protect her diaries. And in New York, an employee of a leading investment house could routinely guard his credit card number. The same software made it possible for thousands to use the Net for confidential business transactions. At the same time, democratic activists in the former Soviet Union would be able protect their messages if tyranny returns.

The name for this encryption package was PGP and by 1995 it was as much a cause as a program. Thousands had downloaded it off the Internet and other networks. Named in tribute to Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery on Garrison Keillor’s radio show, PGP stood for Pretty Good Privacy. PGP lived up to its name—people needed it. Part of the reason was the nature of the Net itself. A skilled hacker could intercept unencrypted e-mail more easily than on the regular commercial networks. Mail often passed through computers at a number of universities and companies before reaching its destination. Without question the best way to protect the contents of your outgoing mail was to scramble its message before you sent it into cyberspace.

PGP was also popular because its use showed that the Net would never accept Clipper chip encryption schemes—designed to make it easier for the government to snoop on citizens.

Not surprisingly, then, at the time I was writing this book, Phil Zimmermann was a hero to many on the Internet. His program meant dignity. It meant safer commerce on the Net. Other privacy protection programs existed, but his was most popular, making it all the more useful. So when the Feds threatened Zimmermann, many people correctly felt as if Washington were attacking them along the way. The irony was that the federal government’s policies against safe encryption could actually threaten world security and had already set back efforts on behalf of computer security.

In a sense the PGP story was part of a continuum, and not just because the Egyptians had scrambled messages four thousand years ago or because encryption had been a staple of Cold Warriors.

Even while growing up in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Phil Zimmermann had tinkered with secret codes. At around age ten he had learned Morse code, Braille, and, via lemon juice, invisible ink. By his teens he was building code wheels; at Florida Atlantic University, he kept up his passion for puzzles and secrets. He started out there in physics; switched to computer science; married; packed up for Boulder, Colorado, where he became a computer consultant; and thought of a move to New Zealand. Phil Zimmermann believed it would be safer, in the event of nuclear war, than Ground Zero countries.

Instead of leaving the States, however, Zimmermann decided to stay and help throttle back the military. Along with the astronomer Carl Sagan and Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame—and hundreds of others—Zimmermann was arrested at testing grounds in Nevada. Soon his love of computers would be converging with his distrust of people in uniforms.

Zimmermann in the early ’80s was selling a gadget that plugged into an Apple II computer but used an 8088 chip just like the then-new IBM personal computer. This gadget was designed to allow people to keep their old Apple hardware and software while running new programs for the fast new chip. Zimmermann called his company Metamorphic Systems. A programmer from Arkansas saw a Metamorphic ad and called Zimmermann to pitch to him an encryption system that was too long to run on most machines. Would Zimmermann care to adapt the system to run on an 8088 chip? He would.^[6.13]

RSA was the encryption method here. Named after its three originators—Ronald Rivert, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman—RSA was a virtually uncrackable form of public key encryption. So what did public key mean? Well, you didn’t have to worry about the wrong set of eyes seeing the jumble of letters and other characters that made up keys for messages transmitted to you. You could freely spread it around. Then someone who wanted to send something confidential to you didn’t have to contact you for a secret key known only to you. He could use your public key by way of his RSA software.

Simply put, the public key approach did away with a major problem: how to send descrambling tools over networks if the information itself wasn’t secured. People who didn’t know each other could trade public keys, then share secrets from the start. They could even use the same software to verify their identities with the help of trusted third parties, who “signed” the keys with sequences of their own. Imagine the many possibilities for allowing safe business transactions on networks between strangers. A lucrative business just might await Zimmermann if he added his own wrinkles.

With RSA, however, came a series of legal nightmares for Zimmermann. Starting work on his own software using RSA, he hadn’t any idea at the start that Rivert, Shamir, and Adleman would be claiming a patent on it.

The trio farmed their rights out to RSA Data Security and, eventually, Public Key Partners. Jim Bidzos, negotiating for RSA, in many ways stood out as a political and philosophical opposite of Zimmermann. Bidzos carried a Greek passport for business reasons but at the same time felt patriotic enough to have volunteered for the U.S. Marines. The way Bidzos tells the story (to Simson Garfinkel, author of PGP: Pretty Good Privacy), Zimmermann asked for a “free license” for use of RSA. “When I told him ‘No,’” Bidzos said, “he was really upset. He told me that he was behind on his mortgage payments and that he had invested years in writing this piece of software.” Bidzos said he suggested that Zimmermann try licensing the patent from a larger company.^[6.14]

Zimmermann’s own side of the story differed starkly—in 1991 he wrote Jim Bidzos a letter saying that Bidzos and Ron Rivert had told him that “you would grant me a free license to make and sell products with your algorithm.”^[6.15] A few years later he would note to the Wall Street Journal that he hadn’t sold PGP before his contract with ViaCrypt, one of RSA’s licensees.^[6.16] He steadfastly maintained he had not broken any laws. Many on the Internet would have agreed, if for no other reason than that they considered software patents to be abominations. Without patents to limit them, many programmers felt they could be more creative. Their ethos was quite in line with the traditional Net ethos. The predecessor of the Internet, after all, hadn’t just been started to allow the Pentagon to survive nukes. It also existed to share knowledge.

By 1991 the patent issue wasn’t the only one dogging Zimmermann. The U.S. Senate was considering a law that would in effect ban Fedproof encryption here in the United States and potentially prevent him from selling the software on which he had been toiling for years now. Washington already forbade export of encryption abroad. The Cold War was winding down, but export controls were still draconian. Hadn’t we won World War II because our technology was better, because we had had nukes, because we could even snoop on secret code transmissions from the enemy? The export laws and the Pentagon put strong encryption equipment in the same category as munitions.

But what about at home? Not surprisingly, the FBI didn’t want the wrong technology to fall into the hands of dope rings, Mafiosi, and others planning or coordinating crimes. In 1991, then, perhaps at the Bureau’s request, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware inserted the following language into an omnibus crime bill: “It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.”

A Senate staffer assured civil libertarians that the measure would not ban strong encryption. Many disagreed. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, library groups, academics, and industry managed to get Washington to drop the offending language.

By then PGP was all over the Net. Smart lobbying, not the software, killed the Biden plan. But Zimmermann’s work was still a good, sound precaution against a relapse. Via bulletin boards and the Internet, a free version was circulating from one end of Planet Earth to the other, having gone overseas within a day of its release. In Zimmermann’s words, it spread “like thousands of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind.” PGP reached Russia and scores of other countries. It wasn’t like nuclear weapons or mini-computers; you couldn’t stop a ship from loading or search the luggage of the suspicious. No, PGP just moved silently over the wires as hackers throughout the world shared Zimmermann’s craft. The way Zimmermann told it, however, he had not broken any of the export laws. And others supported him.

Jim Warren, founder of InfoWorld and a software man respected for his civic activism on the Net, would later recall that Zimmermann gave PGP to an acquaintance named Kelly Goen, who “studiously” limited the uploads to electronic bulletin boards and Internet sites within the United States. Warren was aware of the uploading process while it happened. “The whole idea was to provide it to Americans,” he would remember, “so Americans could have personal privacy and security” in case the U.S. Senate tried to bottle up decent encryption.^[6.17]

The National Security Agency—the secret agency that dealt with many of the best cryptographers and dominated the encryption scene in the United States—did not complain formally when PGP first hit the Net. And Zimmermann fretted. Had his baby failed to safeguard privacy enough to worry the National Security Agency?^[6.18]

Back at RSA Data Security, Jim Bidzos wasn’t thrilled when PGP appeared with RSA technology. He maintained that PGP violated both patent and export law, and at his urging, some commercial services and universities banished PGP from their servers.^[6.19] Legally, Bidzos may or may not have been justified. But once again the hacker ethic prevailed on the Net. Not everyone online took Zimmermann’s side, but by now he was a serious hero to a group of encryption boosters known as “Cypherpunks,” the name that a magazine writer had once given them as a joke.

Many of the Cypherpunks were libertarians, or variants thereof, and they believed in perfect privacy. The punks were to encryption laws what the NationalNational Rifle Association was to restrictions on firearms.

Along with scores of corporations, not just people whom the White House might dismiss as fringe, the Cypherpunks wanted to use encryption to protect digital money. They envisioned a society in which bits and bytes—representing cash—could pass from person to person without Party A knowing Party B’s identity. The Cypherpunks were smart, and often very right. Frustrating for others, but rewarding for them, they tested the tolerance of the most ardent Voltaireans.

Tim May was among the punk leaders. He had once worked for Intel, the chip maker. As Steven Levy put it in an article for Wired, May had “‘retired’ at 34 with stock options sufficient to assure that he would never flip a burger for Wendy’s.” He in some ways came across as the Internet’s Abbie Hoffman, say, or Jerry Rubin. Baby boomers will forever recall these bearded crazies of the 1960s who ran a pig for president and protested materialism by going to Wall Street and scattering money around.

May did not mind getting rich. But he had something of his own to scatter in cyberspace. It was a series of taunts that appeared at the bottom of the many messages he posted to the Net: “Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments.” If Washington had rigged up a machine to scan the Net and measure people by levels of subversion, May would have blown out all the lights and needles. And one of his programs of choice, as advertised amid the other subversion? PGP, what else?

Timothy May and other Cypherpunks over the next few years would tap out thousands of messages, exchanging technical tips, dreaming up new forms of crypto madness, rallying support for encryption and for Phil Zimmermann. This was a whole subculture with a language and an ethics code of its own. Sometimes the Cypherpunks fought among themselves. Later a punk in Colorado “spoofed” Timothy May and, using May’s Internet address, posted malarkey all over the Net. But true to his anarchistic leanings, May did not press for the dissident’s expulsion from the punk mailing list.

Back in November 1992 the punks may have breathed a little easier. George Bush lost the election. No longer would the president be a Republican, a World War II veteran, and a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bill Clinton was a baby boomer. He had spoken out against Vietnam, he had avoided the draft, he liked Fleetwood Mac, he played a saxophone, and his vice presidential candidate had made a name as a loyal supporter of advanced computer networks. So perhaps the Feds would back off on Zimmermann. At the very least maybe the security bureaucracy would face a long delay while the Clinton people puzzled out what to do.

Clinton’s sax and the rest did not count, however; in encryption matters he might as well have been a ninety-nine-year-old fan of Lawrence Welk. Within just a few weeks of the inauguration, two men from the U.S. Customs Department were quizzing Phil Zimmermann. According to the book PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, they said Jim Bidzos had described PGP as a rip-off of the RSA approach.

Following the Zimmermann interview, Customs pressed ahead both on the patent front and on export law issues. Zimmermann, however, denied having swiped PGP from anyone, and he said patent matters should be between him and Bidzos, not between him and Customs. At the time the Feds told him he was not the target of an investigation.^[6.20]

Soon, however, two subpoenas suggested that Washington was still quite eager to justify any and all of the Cypherpunk’s paranoia.

One subpoena went to Austin Code Works, which sold public-domain software that contained some of Zimmermann’s work. Washington struck out. It had been seeking evidence of overseas sales, and Austin lacked any in this case. Zimmermann hadn’t even sold Austin his work directly.^[6.21]

Washington was more lucky at ViaCrypt, a company in Arizona, where the subpoena stuck. Zimmermann had just given ViaCrypt a PGP license. Now he indeed would be under investigation. In PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, Simson Garfinkel observed that RSA Data did not win similar honors even though it had placed encryption-related software on the Internet. Nor did Internet providers such as Netcom, which stored PGP on computers that people overseas could reach.^[6.22] Bill Clinton’s people were letting foreigners dial up this export-controlled software again and again. Needless to say, the bullying of Zimmermann still made the industry nervous—who was next?

As if the Clinton White House hadn’t sinned enough, it was about to embarrass itself in a high-tech version of the Bay of Pigs. That’s how critics regarded a nitwit scheme to control encryption and discourage the public from using good software such as PGP. The Bay of Pigs, a cuckoo plan for the invasion for Cuba, was a legacy that had come to John F. Kennedy from the Eisenhower Administration. The odds would have delighted no one but a masochistic squad of kamikaze pilots. Castro crushed a small band of Cuban exiles who showed up on Washington’s behalf at the Bay of Pigs. Like the debacle on the Cuban beaches, the Clipper chip was really another Republican leftover. The national security apparatus hadn’t been able to con the Bush Administration into implementing Clipper before the election. But Bill Clinton himself lacked the guts to resist the NSA.

“No Such Agency,” as Washington wags called it, operated out of Fort Meade, Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps explaining its fondness for assigning nautical names to encryption plans. Many billions of tax money had gone into the NSA over the years. Thousands worked for it. And they weren’t just interested in the survival of the United States. They wanted job security. Clipper was going to be a meal ticket. Just as some wishful planners had deluded themselves into thinking that a small band of men could tame Cuba, now the NSA was telling Bill Clinton’s people that it could use Clipper to control the world of encryption.

All those irksome constitutional details aside, the NSA’s plan might actually have made sense once. The people at Fort Meade had done the United States a service by staying ahead of Soviet encryption in the era of tail fins and air raid drills. But today such an approach was about as appropriate as a backyard bomb shelter. As far back as the 1970s, two men outside NSA’s control had invented public key encryption, which, as noted before, was a good way for strangers to exchange secure messages and authenticate their identitiesidentities from the start. Whitfield Diffie was a mathematician, computer scientist, and encryption expert. Martin Hellman was an electronic engineer. Both were grouchy about a computer system whose users had to entrust their passwords to the systems managers. So they came up with public key encryption—the same principle that was behind the RSA approach used in PGP, and now available from Boston to Brisbane.

Even Bill Clinton couldn’t repeal the past. Just as the Kennedy Administration had justified Castro’s paranoia, so the Clinton Administration worked hard to do the same with that of the Cypherpunks. This time Washington wouldn’t deploy humans. Instead it wanted to rely on a little computer chip that Steven Levy described as “just another tiny square of plastic covering a silicon thicket.”

“Tumor-sized” might have been more apropos. Clipper, in fact, was a tumor of sorts.

In a human body a tumor serves itself, not its host. And that’s what Clipper was supposed to do. The Clinton Administration wanted to license Clipper to the private sector, where it would show up in millions of telephones and dominate the market—displacing future encryption schemes based on technologies such as PGP. Washington hoped to make Clipper too cheap to resist and to provide a federal market for Clipper products. AT&T and the rest could put Clipper in telephones, and then, supposedly, dope peddlers couldn’t peddle and terrorists couldn’t terrorize without the Feds having a chance to intercept their conversations. The government would also work to make computers snoop friendly.

That was the scenario. Like tumors these government-issue chips were to spread—not only in the States but also overseas. Eventually the Feds would also announce plans to make Clipper available through software, rather than just through the chip. Whatever the incarnation of Clipper, though, Washington would play down the fact that it would corrode the country’s constitutional right to privacy. America’s Winston Smiths would have to trust a government that had covered up an unhealthy number of deaths from nuclear fallout, given us Watergate, and illegally spied on thousands of Americans.

An old friend of mine, Margaret “Peggy” Engel, a former Washington Post reporter who ran and still runs a respected journalism foundation, was among the snoops’ victims. Bureaucrats got the phone company to turn over a list of Peggy’s calls even though she had not committed a crime. It seems a freelance writer had managed to dig up some inside information on the failure of the IRS to collect several billion dollars in back taxes from corporations that had profited from currency hedging. This same writer later applied for a grant from Engel’s organization, the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Vindictively, the Feds snooped on Engel, too, simply because the writer had made a call to Engel’s office for an application for a fellowship.

So it went. Because Peggy and I talked from time to time, the Feds had also tracked her telephone and computer calls to me. They acted against her under a casually issued court order signed not by a judge but by an assistant deputy clerk—one of more than 20,000 such actions issued in the Washington area in 1992. “It’s like getting your parking ticket stamped,” she told me. “That’s the level of scrutiny that these things get. And the number keeps growing. I think it’s because of the increase in fax machines. I think agencies are using it on their employees to find out who talked to the press or Congress.” And now the Feds wanted to license the manufacture of a chip that would spill our secrets on demand.

Granted, the Feds claimed that in the Clipper’s case, one bureaucrat could not spy alone. The official line was that people from both the Treasury Department and the National Institute for Standards and Technology would have to agree before an interception could take place. If they did, the electronic keys would go over the wires to local police or others needing the tap. All this would require a court order. Some Clipper boosters might well have argued, “We’re talking about strict controls.” But Peggy’s experience still showed the potential the Feds had for promiscuous Big Brothering, especially since both the Treasury and the Institute were within the Executive Branch.

Later the front pages would sprout articles about bureaucrats reading the supposedly confidential tax information of their neighbors or of movie stars. Yes, the tax people tightened up their operations to avoid repeats. But supposedly the IRS had been secure in the first place.

The NSA might itself prove capable of some nasty twists. What if it could call up escrow keys from a database despite all talk to the contrary? Or suppose it had a database of its own to unlock all the keys? Would it really want to go to court for authority to snoop? In PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, Garfinkel wisely noted that Washington would let Clipper chips be exported. And the NSA was allowed to spy on nondomestic conversations. So he logically wrote: “If Clipper-equipped radios were being used by Iraqi fighter pilots, the NSA would want to listen in. Although the NSA hasn’t said so publicly, it is doubtful that the agency would jeopardize national security in order to play along with the escrow system.” The NSA might even work out secret deals with the company making the chips, to assure that the results didn’t frustrate the snoops.

Adding to the quite-justified paranoia was the fact that only the dumbest of criminals would rely on Clipper to protect privacy. So what was the point of using technology meant to turn the bad guys into jail bait? Why bother to create it in the first place?

Washington countered that criminals would want Clipper phones to talk securely to the world at large. And I suspected that, yes, they indeed would buy some equipment with Clipper. But for plotting a $10 million dope shipment or a terrorist attack, the black hats would quickly learn to use other scrambling systems; in fact, they could run them on top of Clipper so the Feds still got only gibberish. Even if the Feds banned PGP-style protection, criminals would spread the right hardware and software among themselves. Like drugs or sex, this would be a fine opportunity for entrepreneurial lawbreakers.

The underworld might even sell Clipper-crackers that could make criminals just as good at snooping on America’s Winston Smiths as the Feds would be. High-tech hoods could call their new business Credit Card Numbers Unlimited. Small wonder that Clipper appalled many security specialists.

At the same time, experts for the software industry raised questions about whether the Clipper chip could penetrate the market and, if so, to what extent? Any way you looked at it, the plan was crazy. If Clipper couldn’t catch criminals (and did everyone in the White House really swallow this bilge?), then who was left? People like Peggy Engel, her muckraking grantee, and me. At least part of the time, we would need Clipperish encryption if somehow it surprised the experts and did catch on; our banks might not let us use anything else. How much better if a PGP-style alternative were the standard instead.

Technically, Clipper was just as scary as it was politically and in law-enforcement terms. Scientists and mathematicians loved to dissect encryption schemes in academic papers, and keep checking and rechecking them over the years for flaws. But Clipper’s designers withheld the information that outside experts could use to poke holes in the concept. Unknowns indeed existed. A well-connected scientist at AT&T would later find a significant weakness in the network version of Clipper, a way to cripple the snoop-on-me-please feature.

All in all, Clipper actually emerged as a world security threat. Washington was harming electronic commerce by promoting a crippled and questionable program for encryption. The Administration in effect was delaying the adoption of truly comprehensive security standards for the international community, especially business people outside the States. The standards were on the way, but not as fast as if Clinton’s people hadn’t wreaked havoc on the private sector by way of moronic exportexport controls.

“We need strong cryptography for mainstream society on the Net,” Zimmermann told me. “It’s like making locks. It’s as if I were in the business of selling very, very strong locks.” He reminded me of the case of Kevin Mitnick, who was arrested for breaking into scads of computers and stealing oceans of valuable information. The FBI chased him for a couple of years. “Isn’t it ironic that this guy was able to inflict such damage because our systems are so insecure?” Zimmermann asked. “Our own government suppressed the availability of strong encryption technology. They brought it on themselves, or, I should say more accurately, they brought it down on us.”

At the same time, through Clipper and through efforts against PGP and other effective software, Washington in effect was lending moral support to dictatorships. Clipper used a technique called key escrow. That was a nice way of saying you had to trust Uncle with your secrets since he had a copy of your key. But what if Uncle weren’t Uncle Sam? What if he instead were Uncle Saddam?

“You may have the Saddam Husseins of the world, the North Koreans, being able to hang on to power,” Zimmermann said, “by using this technology to oppress their own political opposition.”

Clipper could do harm even in countries friendly to the United States. Washington wanted them to adopt Clipper-style standards. And at the very least the Clinton Administration was encouraging these governments to demand the keys to whatever encryption schemes their citizens used. That could boomerang mightily against American companies doing business outside the States. Phil Zimmermann recounted to me a rumor he’d heard about a giant entertainment conglomerate that had negotiated a huge deal in France; its executives found the French to be uncannily prescient about the Americans’ tactics. The espionage rumor might or might not be accurate. But fear of French spying against Yanks was common enough for many people from U.S. firms to be very careful about what they said on the telephone, or where they left their suitcases. The French had prohibited strong cryptography. And the Clipper plan, while not a ban on decent encryption, certainly deprived American companies of the moral foundations they needed to protest the French law. In the long run a Clipper arrangement might indeed pave the way for a ban in the United States itself against PGP-strength products, and already it could prop up such moves abroad, to the great disadvantage of American companies with secrets to protect.

In another way, too, Clipperish approaches would make U.S. companies less competitive. American software firms wanted to build encryption into spreadsheets, databases, word processors, and other major applications. If the Feds bullied them into using Clipper, then their products would be less attractive than those of rivals. Consider the market for software to store sensitive material such as medical records; would a European hospital favor a crippled American program over a German program with robust encryption?

That wasn’t so abstract a question. An engineer from the giant Siemens conglomerate in Germany told me later that he was working on medical software, and he expected his employer to clobber U.S. rivals if their products used a questionable, Clipperish encryption scheme. What’s more, crypto mavens were common enough overseas for even American companies to think about hiring them in the former Soviet Union to bypass the export controls. If it happened, it would be the ultimate statement on the absurdity of both the controls and Clipper.

Not surprisingly, a great hue and cry against Clipper came from the American software industry, and meanwhile the hackers themselves were waging full-scale warfare against it on the Net. Thousands of Netfolks participated in the anti-Clipper activities of groups such as the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the first group to sound the tocsin.

In 1994, however, as clueless as ever, the White House officially endorsed Clipper—no ifs ands or buts—and made arrangements for the production of the chips. “Encryption is a law-and-order issue since it can be used by criminals to thwart wiretaps and avoid detection and prosecution,” Al Gore said in justifying Clipper. “It also has huge strategic value. Encryption technology and cryptoanalysis turned the tide in the Pacific and elsewhere during World War II.” But exactly. People on the Net thought that Clipper was just plain brain-dead as a way to protect security, a triumph of bureaucrats over techies.

You even didn’t have to be on the Net to hate the tumor chip. At the request of Time and CNN, Yankelovich Partners polled 1,000 Americans; did they think that private phone calls mattered more than wiretap powers for police? Four-fifths opposed Clipper. Newspapers churned out editorial after editorial, and with good cause: Imagine the joys of trying to expose government corruption if the biggest crooks on the public payroll might someday be able to monitor your conversations whenever they wanted.

Quite properly, then, most citizens did not trust Washington. Hackers wore sweatshirts that played on a slogan that Intel used to promote computers using its chips. Alluding to Clipper, the sweatshirts read, “Big Brother Inside.” Tens of thousands of people on the Net lent their names to an anti-Clipper petition originated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist who cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told how snoopy Feds would have to kill him and pry his private PGP key from his “cold, dead fingers.” Through it all, meg after meg of messages went out over the Net—everything from sophomoric diatribes to carefully reasoned pleas for anti-Clipper letters to local members of Congress.

After questioning some arguments against Clipper, one man found himself vilified all over the Net, complete with a lie that he had made a homosexual advance against a hacker. The privacy movement was supposed to defend Americans’ right to dissent, not enforce its own form of alternative orthodoxy. I felt grumpy, then, about the smear. But that was a relatively rare incident; typical opposition to Clipper was passionate but high minded.

Except for the smear described above, the meanest statements came not from Clipper foes but from Stewart A. Baker, a PGP critic who was about to return to private practice after serving as chief counsel for the National Security Agency. Wired commendably let Baker give his side. The magazine did so “with all the enthusiasm,” Baker wrote, “of Baptist ministers turning their Sunday pulpits over to the Devil.”

Understandably Baker began by denying that Clipper would “create a brave new world of government intrusion into the privacy of Americans.” Baker said that key escrow would merely maintain Washington’s rights to do wire-taps as presently authorized. That was a wrong; the government actually was going out of its way to make us all tap ready, as if we were back in the old Soviet Union in the KGB era. But at least in this case Baker wasn’t maligning the Net. The nastiness oozed out later when his article took on “Myth Number Two: Unreadable encryption is the key to our future liberty.” Baker shrugged off such reasoning as “the long-delayed revenge of people who couldn’t go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework. It reflects a wide—and kind of endearing—streak of romantic high-tech anarchism that crops up throughout the computer world.” Then he let loose against PGP-style programs itself. “Some argue that widespread availability of this encryption will help Latvian freedom fighters today and American freedom fighters tomorrow.” Presumably thousands of PGP boosters were hunkered down making bombs in Manhattan basements.

Having tried to ignore the legitimate uses of PGP by thousands of peaceful, law-abiding citizens, Baker then told how “a high-tech pedophile in Santa Clara, California, had a PGP-encrypted diary of his contacts with susceptible young boys using computer bulletin boards all over the country.” Oh. So between overthrowing the government, PGP users would be seducing eight-year-olds. Baker huffed that “if unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more stories like this.”

Poor Baker. If he’d really wanted to do his attacks right, he could have quoted with full grimness the writings that Timothy May, the Cypherpunk, had posted on the Net in the spirit of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

May was the author of a long, detailed, sometimes even Talmudic list of frequently asked questions and answers on cryptography and the fight for privacy, which might or might not have been on the Net at the time Baker was writing his Wired piece. But if not, he could have found equivalent thoughts among May’s many postings to the Cypherpunks’Cypherpunks’ rather public list. Laying out the case against strong encryption programs in the PGP vein, May conjectured that they could make killing for hire much more practical. People using encryption could rely on trusted agents who dispensed anonymous digital cash. “There are some ways to reduce the popularity of this Murder Incorporated system,” May said, and kindly assured readers that he had been thinking about them.